Is US air quality ever as bad as in Shanghai? (photos)

Americans as terrible people?

Now I know we Californians and Americans in general are terrible people. In California we have these labeling laws that are forcing big corporations like some cola manufacturers to warn their products contain known carcinogens. (According to Consumer Reports, the cola product in question actually reduced its levels of that particular coloring cancer-causing chemical to one quarter of the New York level for the California market. But still not enough to get our labeling laws. I have no idea what elevated levels of known cancer causing chemicals are doing coloring colas; the diabetes factor is bad enough.) We Americans watch the grammies while bombing people in Somalia.

And now we Left Coast hippies are imposing our burdensome health standards on places like Shanghai. Wait a moment. Isn’t the other way around? Our U.S. EPA health standards (and the World Health Organization’s standards, which are much stricter than the EPA’s standards) are driven by scientific studies as to what levels of dust pollution are unhealthy. And, anyway, our blog in particular is not telling Shanghai what to do (or even Los Angeles what to do) — pollution controls can be expensive and are legitimate matters for public debate. We’re simply stating facts — a Chinese target of 35 micrograms per cubic meter would still be at or above the US 24-hour average exposure limit, better than 115 micrograms but still not super clean air.

What we do try to do is empower individual consumers to take control of their air quality, especially their indoor air quality, through new inexpensive home monitoring technologies, the internet of things, air purifiers, respirator masks, bird masks, Angry Bird masks, and, heck, maybe even promote vacations to a clean air parts of the world (a major reason people used to take vacations, before work became so deadly stressful).

With “lower your standards” isn’t Shanghai trying to impose their standards on us? Aren’t they telling us we should ignore science and adopt less vigorous standards so their air quality looks better? (And yes, the official standards are much less strict than in the U.S., although the government there has recently decided to consider handing out respirator masks to the general populace.) Lowering your standards and applying social pressure to get people to “move along” in the interests of creating an industrial empire is how one ends up with PM2.5 dust pollution levels so bad they compare with blizzard white conditions. Traffic accidents do negatively impact industrial growth.

But hey, it’s not as we didn’t have a warning that some societies might look askew at citizens monitoring their own air quality levels. One of the reviewers of our iOS app pointed out some governments would not willingly encourage independent monitoring.

But then we realized … governments are actually our real customer.

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